A Better Angel
by Wickfield
Summary: David Copperfield. She thinks she would not be his better angel if he really knew her heart.


_**A/N: **__Actions don't always match the motives and emotions behind them, and I felt like writing some angsty Agnes fic. List format is inspired by some other authors, most recently Anna Nigma's "Memoirs of a Sugar Queen." Anyway, hope you like it! _

**A Better Angel**

_076. Who?_

* * *

1. Whenever people tell her she is very like her mother, and point to the portrait she knows so well, she smiles and agrees. She very often feels trapped and frozen in time, like the lady on the wall. In that aspect, Miss and Mrs. Wickfield are identical.

2. And there are times when she can scarcely bear her mother's portrait upon the wall. There are even times when, she believes, she hates to see it there. She has heard all her life about that kind good lady, but (though she would never tell her father, for it would break his heart), she tires of the sight of her mother always staring down at her, and never helping her.

3. She sometimes wonders if she has appointed herself housekeeper in order to claim some kind of control, some semblance of order, over the lonely house. That may very well be – but then she realizes she also craves cleanliness, and if she sees a picture hanging crooked on its post, or a speck of dust where there should be none, she bounds up to right that insufferable wrong. Trotwood laughs at her when she interrupts the middle of the conversation to make her corrections, but so far that hasn't broken the habit.

4. It is so strange to her now to think that once upon a time, she felt Trotwood to be an intruder in the household. It wasn't the same as when Uriah arrived and she knew he would be bound to the office in the daytime, and then would go home of an evening – Trotwood was always there in the room with herself and her father, always at the dinner table, always speaking of his books and his studies with a bold easiness that made her almost jealous.

5. One night Trotwood came to sit beside her at the piano (though she was in the middle of the song) and offered (though she was attentive to the music) to turn the pages for her (though no one had ever asked her before), so (because it was the right thing to do) she allowed him. Sometimes now she wishes he had simply left her there, by herself, as she always had been – then perhaps, she would not feel so lonely now without him.

6. Trotwood seems to have a high opinion of her, although she doesn't know why. He calls her his better angel, and when she protests, he says she is too modest, and that he knows her better than she knows herself. But when he says this, she really wonders if he knows her at all.

She thinks she would not be his better angel if he really knew her heart.

7. And besides, she knows herself to be very fickle – sometimes she considers herself spoilt, though not perhaps in the screaming pettish way of other children. She must have time for her piano, and her books, and her cleaning, and herself – for as dull as her life sounds, it is _her_ life, and she is not always willing to share her time, the one thing she claims for her absolute own.

8. Sometimes she believes she is more like her father than she ever thought, or than she would ever care to admit. She wonders if this why she finds it so difficult to blame him for any of his faults. After all, he does not mean to be weak, to abandon his life to the control of others. Neither does she.

9. She likes to provoke Trotwood whenever he falls in love. At first she likes to make him blush because he is very shy, and it amuses her to see a boy so moonstruck.

When she starts making him blush because she thinks him beautiful when he does it – she knows she is in trouble.

10. In the fairy stories she used to read, those most wretched in circumstance were always great of heart and kind of spirit, and so Uriah Heep, according to his own history, should have meant no harm. She wonders if perhaps it was a vanity to assume he was so low beneath her that he was only capable of goodness. Now she understands that the most wretched person may harbor as much ambition, and wield as much power, as any tyrant in a glittering castle.

11. She so wanted to hate Dora, and considers it just another failure when she does not. It would be better if she were her rival, if she had some great defect – then she would find it much easier to keep Trotwood for herself.

12. The only reason she gives her father wine is because she would rather pour it herself than watch his hand tremble anymore. She knows this action implicates her in his fall – she can see it in the dark red pair of eyes that watches all she does. Stubbornly, she allows herself this weakness. Her father has claimed enough for himself.

13. Apparently a heart breaking is not some great shattering moment, the way she once believed. It happens slowly, first with a mark, then with a gash, then with great gaps where the pieces once connected. Dora holds her hand during the ceremony as if she has stolen something. Luckily for her, Agnes has not even the heart to pull away.

14. When Trotwood is married and gone away forever, she realizes that she is alone in the house with her father and Uriah Heep; they are the only men left in her life and she wonders if her goodness has been worth it. Her father has fallen low, and Trotwood and Uriah have their hearts' desire: love for one, and power for the other. And what does she have, for all her self-denial? Nothing.

16. There is a call in the middle of the night, that call everyone has been awaiting, and now Dora holds her hand once more, like a thief. And all of a sudden Agnes realizes that selflessness is not the same as self-denial. Life does not have to consist of giving up all happiness. One can have it and enjoy it and pass it on when someone else needs it more. So Dora does.

16. She decides she will no longer allow herself to be controlled, for she is not her father. She is tired of waiting for something that will never happen. She can make a little living on her own. She can start a school.

17. She still plays at her piano after lessons are ended, though now she turns her own pages without the shade of sadness. A heart can break and mend stronger. And she finds she can live her life alone, and no longer be lonely, for her newfound strength.

18. Betsey Trotwood knows her secret and Agnes Wickfield is mortified beyond compare. After all her careful actions, is she still so transparent? Mr. Dick looks at her with a twinkling eye that seems to know her every thought.

19. Her love for David Copperfield is not what it once was because it is not the tender love of a lonely and weak girl, as it had been in their youth. Nor is it the love of any better Angel; it is selfless, but not the self-denying love that lost him once before.

Yet it is just as strong as it has ever been. That is all it needs to be.

20. Even after twenty years, she never calls him David, because she knows the last person who did broke his heart. No words ever pass between them on this subject, and yet he knows. It is one of her secrets that even he can discover.


End file.
